Pages

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Frank Rich on the Republican quest for new windmills to tilt at, now that our dire economic straits have rendered (mostly) inert the hot button "culture war" issues (guns, gays, God) that they wielded like bludgeons for the past several years and, more broadly, for the past several terms:

Even were the public still in the mood for fiery invective about family values, the G.O.P. has long since lost any authority to lead the charge. The current Democratic president and his family are exemplars of precisely the Eisenhower-era squareness — albeit refurbished by feminism — that the Republicans often preached but rarely practiced. Obama actually walks the walk.

And later:

What’s been revealing about watching conservatives debate their fate since their Election Day Waterloo is how...so many of them don’t want to confront the obsolescence of culture wars as a political crutch. They’d rather, like [Eric] Cantor, just change the subject — much as they avoid talking about Bush and avoid reckoning with the doomed demographics of the G.O.P.’s old white male base. To recognize all these failings would be to confront why a once-national party can now be tucked into the Bible Belt.

Yet, knowing this would be a big story, Gov. Palin still agrees to run for Vice President. I guess her personal ambition is more important than her daughter's privacy.

So they take the teenage father, a self-described "f***ing redneck" who "likes to kick @$$", put him in a suit & tie, and bring him to the RNC to hold hands with the daughter on camera. Imagine if this had been one of the Obama's daughters. The Right would've had a field day with that, denouncing this as a bad example, calling the baby daddy a thug, blah blah blah.

They tried to play it off, claiming that the couple's engagement had nothing to do with politics, even saying that they were already planning to get married before she was pregnant (yeah, right). And now, SURPRISE SUPRISE, McPalin loses, and now it turns out that the couple is not getting married after all.